Lure of the Temptress (1992)

I enjoyed the first part of the game in the dungeon. There was some some thinking outside the box to solve some puzzles, but overall there was a certain amount of logic to them. In other words they were solvable. In the next part of the game, in the village, exploration was good and progress continued in a somewhat logical fashion at the beginning. However, to progress much further you end up having to try every possible action with every NPC and every object because there's no logic or hints or clues to what you're supposed to do next. I finally resorted to looking at a walk-through and was like, "How am I supposed to have come up with that?" I'm not saying the puzzles should be easy, I enjoy the challenge of interactive fiction games and solving puzzles, but there's got to be some reason for doing a particular action. I read a bit further in the walk-through and all the rest of it was the same. Complete moon logic - like I'm supposed to magically pull the solution out my butt. I became more work to play the game than play. Since it was no longer enjoyable in the slightest, I deleted it. The graphics and sound are good. The user interface is good enough. The story is probably cool, too, but there's no way I'm ever going to finish the game to find out what it is.

This type of point and click adventure was all the rage in the early 90s, on both the Amiga, Atari ST and the newly rising PC gaming scene (much before 1990 PCs were too poor to allow games of any quality). I had this on the Amiga 500 circa 1991, and this was not one that impressed me even back then! Not a patch on Monkey Island I or II! Puzzles were stupid, the constant getting punched by that orc, sent back to "square one" and having to repeat everything over and over and over had me rage quitting. So no, I never did "get out of the dungeon". Even for free all I got from playing this was a very late, unecessary lesson in how Amiga 500 games of the time were superior to their PC cousins - that started changing circa 1993/4! For example, lets see the Amiga 500 doing "Doom" in 93! And also a lesson in how annoying, and naff, this title was. Still, you're not out of pocket here. It's free.

This is of course a classic point'n'click adventure game, something I am a big fan of. I played this many years ago as a child and along the years, I had forgotten about it. Just recently I downloaded this and found a pretty good game. The graphics are good for the time and helps in providing the dark atmospheric feel that I had come to expect from the rather scary intro. Regardless, the sound is certainly quite bad, so you'll need to play around with the sound settings via SCUMMVM to actually get something that won't hurt your ears too badly. The gameplay is rather difficult because it suffers from the same point'n'click 'use-everything-on-everything-on-and-on' problem, and while your mission is clear, your objectives are not. To put it briefly, it's an old game and it shows, but it's definitely not bad.

...in that it differed from popular games at the time. It would be fair to acknowledge that King Graham of Daventry from the King's Quest Series was usually involved in unlikely events, whereas Revolution Software came up with the idea of creating an adventure game that although it didn't take itself TOO serious, did have a serious story, bravely putting themselves somewhere between Lucas Arts and Sierra. It was the first built with the Virtual Theatre Engine allowing in-game characters to wander around its world independent of each other, performing everyday life actions, which before had never been featured in ANY game. A 2D point-and-click interface adventure with a system of drop down lists, you guide your hero Diermot through his world and interact with the environment selecting from different commands via the mouse, picking up various objects which can be used with other collectable items, with parts of the scenery, or with other people in order to solve puzzles. You'll engage in dialogue with other characters through textual conversation trees which will provide hints as to what needs to be done in order to progress through the plot. A few action oriented battle scenes are also part of the game. Somewhat extra-ordinary is the fact that all sounds are done via music, placed just in the right place, as well as tunes very sparingly utilized to create a somber world. One might say this game was REVOLUTIONary for its time; pardon the pun. You can play through it in three or four easy sittings. A picture is worth a thousand words so I imagine a video could be worth more. If you would spare 5 minutes of your time, please check out... https://youtu.be/eEVnywmx520 Thank you for reading this review, and perhaps checking out the video. I hope both were helpful.

TL;DR - I have played much more limited adventures way older than this that were a lot more fun, better written and had a functioning interface. This game is all about wasted potential. Lots of great ideas, horrible implementation. Making the town less static by having people run around is cool, if it wouldn't mean you in turn have to run around and search for that one guy that triggers the next scene. Same goes for the partner feature, in theory giving your ingame buddy some instruction would be cool - but it's just seldom used and rather clunky. Horrid pathfinding and other characters constantly blocking your way doesn't help. The game seems glitchy too, with people getting stuck in screen transitions and "sound" that feels more like a broken file rather than music (there are some proper tracks in the game though). Finally, story, characters and puzzles are forgettable and there is very little flow as you keep wandering aimlessly hoping to find that dialogue-line that triggers any form of advancement. The games strongest point is the very pretty pixelart, if you are into that cliched eighties power-metal kind of thing. Apart from that, a complete waste of time and no, being free doesn't make it any better.